THEATER

THEATER; A Cerebral Modernist Whose Revolution Rolls On

Published: January 24, 1999

Correction Appended

(Page 2 of 2)

SINCE then, Ms. Akalaitis has continued to direct in regional theater. (She is one of a group known for reinterpreting classic works, which includes Anne Bogart and Robert Falls.) Several months after she was deposed at the Public, she directed the rarely produced play ''In the Summer House'' by Jane Bowles at Lincoln Center Theater; in 1994 her production of ''Suddenly Last Summer'' was seen at Hartford Stage, and her adaptation of Jack Kerouac's ''Ti-Jean's Blues,'' was presented last season at the Actors Theater of Louisville. She also shares control of the directors program at the Juilliard School, and has recently tried her hand at opera. In September, she will become the head of Bard College's new drama division.

''I stopped reacting to the things that people write about me a long time ago; that can really drive you crazy,'' said Ms. Akalaitis recently, during a conversation in her modest, airy co-op on the ground floor of a tidy East Village apartment building. A small fake fire glowed in the nonworking fireplace, exuding coziness and irony at the same time. ''What drives me is that I am fundamentally convinced of the potential of theater. With every project you get born again and that is indescribably wonderful.''

Brought up in a working-class Lithuanian family in Cicero, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, Ms. Akalaitis has been involved in experimental theater ever since she got a degree in philosophy at the University of Chicago. After working briefly with Jerzy Grotowski, the influential Polish director who died this month, she became a co-founder of the theater collective Mabou Mines in 1970. In the early 1980's, when the performance-art scene was exploding, she produced such imagistic work as the dreamlike, impressionistic ''Dressed Like an Egg'' (1977), suggested by the writings of Colette.

By the mid-1980's, some of her contemporaries in experimental theater had decided to move closer to the mainstream. Mr. Gray, for example, focused on solo work driven by narrative. Others began to commute to Hollywood, like Willem Dafoe and the late Ron Vawter, between appearances in avant-garde productions by the Wooster Group. A few, like the surrealist director Richard Foreman and Elizabeth LeCompte, head of the Wooster Group, continued to present their own idiosyncratic productions.

Ms. Akalaitis took a different route: bringing techniques of experimental theater to bear on classic works, setting Beckett's ''Endgame'' in a post-apocalyptic subway car (the production was denounced by the playwright), and ''The Balcony'' by Genet in Latin America, complete with a Ruben Blades soundtrack. A champion of the German writer Franz Xaver Kroetz, she has directed a number of his plays, and worked abroad, as well, in Germany, Italy and France.

In 1989, with the experimental designer George Tsypin, she presented ''The Screens'' by Genet at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Critics were dazzled by the visual effects of the more than five-hour epic, involving the Algerian struggle for independence, and praised the direction, while questioning the performability of the unwieldy text. The same year, Ms. Akalaitis presented ''Cymbeline'' at the Public Theater.

Although in the past she has declined to talk much on the record about her departure from the Public, she recalled it as ''an awful time, maybe the most powerful moment in my life.'' She said she rarely thinks of it now, though she still will not walk past the building on Lafayette Street.

''I was very angry at first, but I have no bitterness now,'' she said. ''That's the way I've always looked at the world. I never saw the job as the only thing in my life. I'm not saying it wasn't shocking, and inappropriate the way it ended, but there were a lot of great things about being at the Public, about knowing Joe, about being given the chance to make an impact.''

She took the job, she said, out of a genuine belief she could contribute to theater in New York, ''and because Joe asked me.'' Papp had approached several others about the job, including Meryl Streep and Mike Nichols, but they declined.

Walking into the Public as the artistic director was ''like descending into the basement of a Romanian castle,'' Ms. Akalaitis said. She had always found acting and directing plays remarkably free of politics and sexism, she added, but being an administrator was different. It required savvy people-handling as well as the schmoozing that is part of backroom negotiation and fund-raising -- skills that did not mesh well with Ms. Akalaitis's tendency to say what she thinks.

The firing, she said, came as a total surprise. Which, considering that virtually everyone around her saw it coming, is a mark of two of Ms. Akalaitis's most unexpected qualities: she is, she admits, both naive and optimistic.

If she were asked to do it all over again, she said, ''I would take the job in a minute; how could you turn down a chance like that?''

A tall woman with the bearing of a dancer, she avoids the florid emotionalism of many theater people, but with a little coaxing talks with obvious pride about her two grown children. Her forbidden vice is ''Another World,'' the daytime television soap. ''Drama in its crudest form,'' she said. ''If I weren't so confused by my VCR, I would tape it.''

Although she has been called a humorless feminist by some of her critics, she said she often finds herself at odds with doctrinaire women's studies types. ''They have asked me if I think Euripides was a feminist and I have to say, 'A feminist? We're talking about ancient Greece here. Euripides was a guy in a towel, for crying out loud.' ''

Nancy Hass, who teaches journalism at New York University, is a frequent contributor to Arts and Leisure.

Correction: January 24, 1999, Sunday A picture caption on page 17 of the Arts & Leisure section today, with an article about the director JoAnne Akalaitis, misspells the given name of an actress in the 1993 Lincoln Center Theater production of ''In the Summer House.'' She is Dianne Wiest, not Diane.